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Nuovi-nuovi: The Return to the Image in 1980s Italian Art
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Between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Italian art went through a phase of profound transformation. After the season of the neo-avant-gardes, Arte Povera, and conceptual research, many artists returned to questioning the image, painting, narration, and the possibility of recovering fragments of art history without proposing them in a nostalgic key.
It is in this context that the Nuovi-nuovi movement was born, one of the most significant experiences of Italian postmodernism. The term was introduced by Renato Barilli, together with Francesca Alinovi and Roberto Daolio, on the occasion of the exhibition Dieci anni dopo: i Nuovi-nuovi, inaugurated at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna in March 1980.
The historical and social context
Italy in the early 1980s was emerging from a decade marked by political tensions and ideological crises. With the start of the new decade, the climate changed: Italian society entered a more fragmented phase, marked by the expansion of consumerism and the growing role of mass communication. Art too responded to this shift, recovering figure, color, sign, and narrative.
The Nuovi-nuovi did not constitute a homogeneous school nor a group founded on a unified manifesto, but a constellation of different research paths, united by a new openness toward the image and by a postmodern attitude: history was no longer rejected, but traversed, recomposed, and contaminated with languages drawn from literature, music, comics, and contemporary visual culture.
The birth of the Nuovi-nuovi
The "baptism" of the movement took place in Bologna in 1980, with an exhibition curated by Barilli, Alinovi, and Daolio, bringing together artists very different from one another, united by the desire to move beyond the rigidity of the previous avant-gardes. Among the names associated with the core of the movement are Luigi Ontani, Luciano Bartolini, Bruno Benuzzi, Enzo Esposito, Marcello Jori, Felice Levini, Luigi Mainolfi, Salvo, and Vittorio D'Augusta.
The term "Nuovi-nuovi" reflects well Barilli's critical proposal: not a simple return to painting, but the possibility of freely reusing the past, in a mobile, cultured, ironic, or decorative manner.
Iconic and aniconic
The group was articulated around two main orientations. The iconic artists worked on the figure, on the recovery of myth and narration. The aniconic artists developed research closer to sign, surface, and decorative structure. This distinction emerges clearly in the exhibition Una generazione postmoderna. Iconici, aniconici, immagine elettronica, curated by Barilli and Daolio in 1984 at the Musei Civici of Reggio Emilia.
The artists
Luciano Bartolini represents a figure of particular importance for the meditative quality of his research, which interweaves analytical painting and Eastern culture in a lyrical and symbolic dimension.
Bruno Benuzzi belongs to the more iconic component of the movement, with a painting that welcomes enigmatic figures and presences, interweaving memory, irony, and narrative.
Enzo Esposito is among the most significant artists of the aniconic side: intense chromatic fields and powerful visual structures, distant from direct figuration but not from the force of the image.
Marcello Jori occupies an autonomous position, moving across painting, writing, and narrative in a visionary dimension that coexists with a reflection on language.
Felice Levini testifies to the overcoming of rigid separations between painting, sculpture, and installation, with research that is often ironic and theatrical.
Luigi Mainolfi introduces a plastic and sculptural dimension of great importance, founded on the use of terracotta and bronze and on a reflection on myth and primary forms.
Salvo, already close to Arte Povera, moved through the 1980s with a luminous and cultured painting, in which landscapes, architectures, and ruins become suspended images constructed through a sophisticated relationship with the history of painting.
Vittorio D’Augusta took part in the Nuovi-nuovi season, exhibiting with the group at several significant venues. His research, after the conceptual and analytical experiences of the 1970s, returned to placing painting at its center, with an autonomous language tied to matter, figure, and the memory of the image.
The Italian scene of the 1980s
Alongside the core of the Nuovi-nuovi, parallel research developed sharing the return to the image and to the memory of art history. Within this horizon are also Davide Benati, with his painting of transparencies and light apparitions, and Omar Galliani, close to the Magico Primario and to Anacronismo, with research founded on drawing, figure, and cultured citation.
Re-reading the Nuovi-nuovi
To re-read the Nuovi-nuovi today means observing a decisive passage in Italian art: the moment in which the work returns to engage with the pleasure of the image without renouncing the critical awareness matured in the preceding decades. This is not a naïve return to painting, but a new linguistic freedom founded on the crossing of codes and on the possibility of holding together history, decoration, sign, matter, and narrative.
The Nuovi-nuovi remain one of the central experiences of Italian postmodernism. Alongside their core, figures such as Davide Benati and Omar Galliani help us understand the broader richness of the Italian artistic scene of the 1980s.
